Harvard mathematician Shing-Tung Yau says China trails the pack in his field. He's tapping money and power to change that.

Americans suffer from an inferiority complex when it comes to math. They see China's students scoring higher in international comparisons and Chinese professors populating the math faculties at the best U.S. universities. But Shing-Tung Yau, a Chinese-born Harvard mathematician, doesn't see it that way. At the highest levels, he says, mathematicians in China are far behind their Western counterparts: "Most Chinese still use technology from America. I want them to create their own research so they don't rely on others and don't copy."

A dozen years ago Yau set out to make that happen. He's been building three advanced math institutes--in Hong Kong, Beijing and Hangzhou, 100 miles southwest of Shanghai--and conducting a relentless courtship of wealthy moguls. Thanks to millions chipped in by Li Ka-shing (No. 9 on the billionaires list), Robert Kuok (No. 104), brothers Ronnie and Gerald Chan and others, Yau's institutes have trained hundreds of postgraduates. Many are going on to teach in Chinese universities, slowing the brain drain that has long had China sending its smartest students abroad, never to return. "I hope these students will have an influence on the future of China," he says. "For China to become a society built on technology, it needs a solid background, and math is the basic language for that. Physics, software, engineering, banking, insurance--all depend on math research."

The flow of funds has helped Yau persuade Chinese math minds from around the world to sign on as associates of his institutes. But a big attraction is the 57-year-old Yau himself: He's the leading Chinese mathematician and ranks among the top ten in the world, says Phillip Griffiths, a math professor and a former president of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Yau has been a professor at Harvard for 20 years, specializing in geometry, differential equations and mathematical physics. A U.S. citizen, he won the Fields Medal (the equivalent in mathematics of a Nobel Prize) in 1982, a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1985 and the President's National Medal of Science in 1997. "Yau is like God in China," says Tony Chan, the assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation outside Washington, D.C. and a visiting professor at the Hong Kong institute. "He goes to China and he can see the premier. In the U.S. even the director of the NSF cannot see President Bush."

But in the past year Yau has gotten into two very public spats. One was with Beijing University, which he accused of corruption. The other was with the New Yorker, which in August portrayed him as trying to steal credit for proving the Poincaré conjecture, a 103-year-old problem that was the holy grail of topology. The theorem concerns a three-dimensional space with no boundaries. It says that if in this space any closed-curve object, such as a rubber band, can be shrunk to a point, then the space is topologically equivalent to a sphere. Yau says the magazine's charge is completely false; other news outlets looking into the issue found evidence to back him up.

Occupying three floors of the simply named Academic Building No. 1 of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the New Territories, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences started slowly. "In Hong Kong most rich men [who give to schools] want a building named after them," says Yau. "But we didn't even have a building."

An undergraduate at Harvard led Yau to his first big donor, one who didn't ask for naming rights and turned down an honorary degree. That donor was the student's father, Malaysian tycoon (but Hong Kong resident) Kuok. He gave $6 million that started an endowment and attracted the institute's first full-time faculty member in 1998, a professor from New York University. Then Kuok introduced Yau to his friend, Asia's richest resident, Li Ka-shing, who donated $1.3 million. Ronnie Chan, a Hong Kong real estate magnate who had known Yau since the professor's days teaching at Stanford University in the 1970s, introduced him to his uncle, Thomas Chen, who dished out another $1.3 million.

A $2 million check came from William Mong, owner of Shun Hing Electronic Holdings in Hong Kong, a Panasonic distributor since the 1950s. The Japanese brand's technology "made me wish we had more capable engineers in Hong Kong and China, and that's my aim now." The money helped endow a chair and hire another permanent faculty member. Today the institute gets 100 applicants from China and elsewhere in Asia for each class of 20 in its five-year master's-and-Ph.D. program. The program includes such novel topics as betting on horse races, creating 3-d images of people and predicting the weather.

For Yau's Morningside Center in Beijing, he got help from the Chinese government and the Chan brothers. The government donated a plot, and the brothers put up the money for the building that the center shares with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It trains 250 researchers a year in six-month sessions. Now, in a bid to take on research institutes abroad, it offers an award that it hopes will someday rival the Fields Medal.

Yau is one of eight children. His family fled across the border to Hong Kong after the Communists took control of China in 1949. Growing up without electricity and running water in a village near Chinese University--where his father was a professor--he was more interested in skipping school than in learning arithmetic. But when he was 14 his father died and he became serious about his studies. He enrolled at Chinese University and in 1969 moved on to graduate school at UC, Berkeley. In 1971, at just 22, Yau earned his Ph.D.

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